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Singularity gets delayed due to Modern Warfare 2 hype

Activision has made the conscientious decision to delay the Raven Software developed Singularity from 2009 to Q1 2010. This decision was made due to the launch of Modern Warfare 2 falling so close to Singularity’s:

The level of excitement for Infinity Ward’s Modern Warfare 2 coming out of E3 well exceeded our expectations and therefore we have decided to move Raven’s upcoming sci-fi first person action title, Singularity, from 2009 to Q1 2010. We believe that the March quarter will provide a better opportunity to establish the new cutting-edge action IP as a ‘must-have’ title and clears the way for Modern Warfare 2 to dominate this holiday season.”

You can’t really blame this decision, can you? I mean with all of the hype surrounding Modern Warfare 2 there is a low chance of any game being released even remotely close to it generating the same buzz.

So, Raven Software’s FPS Singularity will be out for the PC, Xbox 360 and PS3 in March of 2010.

Read (Destructoid)

Call of Juarez: Bound In Blood Game Review–Good But Only In Isolation

I’ll admit up front today, folks, that I actually enjoyed Call of Juarez: Bound In Blood on the Xbox 360 for what it was–a surprisingly well-done, a surprisingly intuitive, first person shooter that brought plenty of action right from the word go, and a story that actually held my interest.  But there are still problems to be had here, and we’ll get into those directly.

First, the plot itself.  A prequel to the original Call of Juarez, this time we’re with the McCall brothers as they fight their way through Georgia at about the same time William Tecumseh Sherman began his infamous March to the Sea.  With Georgia in slowly burning ruins, the McCalls, despite their spectacular valiance, aren’t able to repulse the invasion.  It even gets personal when Sherman’s March takes the McCall family farm with it.  Thus, two out of the three brothers McCall turn outlaw and go off to find the legendary gold of Juarez.  Along the way, they’ll tackle a variety of enemies–an Apache connected to the gold, a Mexican bandit and his lovely concubine, and even the Confederate army they went AWOL from in otder to turn outlaw.  The McCall brothers will thus launch a swath of lawlessness and destruction that will in turn leave its mark on the entirety of the old West forever.

I know, it sounds like an awesome story.  And watching it unfold, it really IS an awesome story.  But this is not where the aforementioned problems come into play.  The problems themselves come in on the actual gameplay end of things.

The controls are solid enough–no real problem there–but the biggest problem is that Call of Juarez: Bound In Blood is so very limited.  For instance, in the first level, you’re mostly crawling around in some trenches, trying to piece together where exactly you’re supposed to go.  Sure, you’ve got a marker giving you some idea where to go, but it’s still tough to tell if you need to take this corner or that corner back there and go around the long way, if you get my drift.

I’m convinced that I’ve become somewhat spoiled by Fallout 3 as I wind up comparing every first person shooter I play to it.  And sure enough, stacked up against an opening act like that, pretty much everything else will have to pale in comparison.  There’s just no two ways about it–you can’t eat a porterhouse steak then go chow down on meatloaf and say it’s on par with the best beef ever.  So what you have to do in response is take everything in isolation.  By itself, Call of Juarez has a decent multiplayer mode with lots of options, plenty of wild action, lots of gunplay and explosivesplay and all the things that make a shooter game solidly entertaining.  The graphics are at least fair, and the sound is solidly done.

And yet I still find myself somewhat let down, because I’ve seen what first person shooters actually can be. I’ve seen the kind of fun that can be had when you put someone behind the gun and let them roam wild and free over a huge map.  Every maze-crawler, every railroad run, every point-a-to-point-b game that follows is just a sad, sorry imitation.  Call of Juarez: Bound In Blood may be good enough for a play, but it’s definitely not as good as it could be.

Aspyr And Mindware Announce Mental FPS

In the video game industry there’s usually a reverse correlation between the uniqueness of the premise and how combat focused it is. Don’t get me wrong, games like the God of War series and Mass Effect definitely have a lot going for them in terms of style and plot, but the basic barebones ideas behind each aren’t terribly unique: fighting monsters from ancient mythologies and shooting various alien creatures in space.

Every once in a while though we get an interesting game that brings an interesting take on one of the standard action formulae. First person shooters are notoriously uninventive, but Aspyr Media and Mindware Studios are teaming up to create an FPS that’ll blow your mind. Or at least blow it up. Some writers have toyed with the idea of psychic therapy, somehow going directly into someone’s mind to fix their issues, but in Dreamkiller you’ll be taking a much more cathartic approach. As psychologist Alice Drake you possess the unusual ability to enter into the minds of your patients and fight their demons with an array of weapons and powers.

The game will be spread over twelve different levels with an overarching plot that hurtles you towards a showdown with an ultimate evil force. It might not be the most unique premise in the world, feeling like the love child of the film The Cell and an HP Lovecraft story but the underlying potential is great. Games that take place in a setting which can completely ignore any laws of physics or realistic dimensions can be incredibly unique and unusual. Do I think this game will live up to its incredible potential? Probably not, but I can certainly hope. The title is set to ship this fall for PC and Xbox 360.

Fallout 3 Point Lookout Game Review–They Really Mean It, Folks

I know, it’s something of a non sequitur and a pun all at the same time, but basically, when they say Point Lookout, they mean, look out.  Because for some reason, they’ve stuffed some serious baddies in that swampy ground, and it’s not going to be easy to get through.

This time in the greatest first person shooter that man has ever known, you’ll board a riverboat bound for Point Lookout, Maryland (which is, apparently, an actual place, unless I’m being hoaxed.  This is possible as I’ve never been to Maryland, but a cursory net search suggests that there really is a Point Lookout) with a goal in mind before you even get off the boat–to find a young woman’s missing daughter.  Of course, once you’re actually in Point Lookout, you’ll discover that there’s an incredible opportunity to be had here, as there’s virtually no one in sight when you actually get off the boat.  You can loot as you please!  And there’s PLENTY of loot to be had here–you’ll walk into a mostly abandoned seaside town / amusement park complex where there’s only one person, and she’s tending a shop.  But right away, you’ll notice there’s something very wrong with Point Lookout, and it’s not just the psuedonuclear shambles that every other place in the Capitol Wasteland is.  The Point Lookout motel contains scenes of horror even a raider would shrink from.  The Pint-Sized Slasher even makes a bit of a reappearance (he’s not just a newspaper blurb any more!) and the secrets, lies, and mysteries contained in that swamp are more than you could ever imagine.

There’s all manner of new equipment to be had here, but most of it is a little on the mundane side.  An axe, a shovel, a lever-action rifle that fires 10mm rounds and a double-barrelled shotgun will all make appearances, as will simpler things like workman’s coveralls and a Confederate cap, which is somewhat ironic as Maryland was a border state that leaned heavily toward the Union with only a few dissenters.  In fact, a whole LOT of Point Lookout seems to be done in that antebellum style of the Civil War-era South.  The huge manor houses, the relentless bayous…a lot of it just screams Louisiana.

Now, just so you know, I didn’t go in there cold.  I had recently reset my character to get the full experience back when Broken Steel came out, so I was a bit behind, but I took the riverboat at level fourteen, with the full loadout from the Project Anchorage vault.  I had my Chinese stealth armor, I had my Gauss rifle and a laser rifle with plenty of microfusion cells, I even had a Gatling laser, and I was getting chewed up at virtually every turn.  I don’t know how these “swamp people” who seem to have no more armor than their overalls are managing to absorb metal pellets fired at near-relativistic speeds when I’m blowing away Enclave troops in powered armor within three hits with the same hardware.

That’s about my only real gripe here–Point Lookout is some amazing fun, even if I do need to bring the equivalent of a light armored division or maybe Liberty Prime itself just to pacify the populace.  I love the darker tone and the subtle infusion of horror gameplay, something that game companies should definitely take note of.  Imagine this game with ZOMBIES.  And I’m not talking ghouls, but actual zombies.

One thing, however, remains crystal clear–Fallout 3, and by extension Point Lookout, is still the best action RPG I’ve ever played.

Halo 3: ODST Getting Preorder Bonus

Despite legions of Halo haters, the sci-fi series continues to perform well with thousands of people shooting, blasting and meleeing each other on Xbox Live every day. The newest installment, Halo 3: ODST will be releasing fairly soon, meaning that the marketing blitz begins. Players who pre-order the game will get a bonus character for use in the multiplayer mode.

If you’ve played through any of the single player campaigns you’ll have no trouble recognizing Seargant Avery Junior Johnson, the tough-as-nails cigar chomping soldier who despite being a bit of a cliche still made the series a little more enjoyable. You can use him in the game’s ‘firefight’ mode, an online co-op setting where players battle against waves of increasingly difficult opponents, similar to Gears of War’s ‘Horde’ mode, which seems to be the new trend in multiplayer gaming, a sort of synthesis between the standard team based deathmatches and single player campaigns, allowing for maximum carnage with none of that pesky story to get in the way. If that wasn’t enough, everyone who purchases the game, preorder or no will get access to the Halo: Reach multiplayer beta.

Red Faction Guerilla Game Review–The Best Red Faction Game Yet

Recently, a game landed onto the Xbox 360 that left me a little cold.  It was called Red Faction; Guerilla, and was yet another sequel to the first person shooter original and first sequel.  And when I first laid hands on this one I sighed in the deepest resignation and dragged out my thesaurus hoping I could find a new word for “craptacular”.   Seriously, I’m so very tired of first person shooters.  There are so few good ones.

But then I got it in, and I’ll tell you, I was pleasantly surprised.  Surprised is almost too weak a reaction, but is it really possible to be pleasantly shocked?

Anyway, you play a miner whose focus is in demolitions freshly landed on Mars a while after the earlier events of Red Faction.   The Earth Defense Force, which for some reason isn’t even ON Earth any more, is acting as an occupation force on Mars, backing up pretty much ever evil move that the Ultor Corporation (THQ just loves the name Ultor, I guess) makes.  This is doubly odd since, originally, the Earth Defense Force was a collection of GOOD guys who assisted Red Faction.  So much for that, huh?

So now you’re on planet, and the EDF just wiped out your brother for “crimes”.  No one really bothered to tell you what they were before they blasted him with what looked like a vulcan cannon, or before they came after you and discovered that you had explosives in your trailer (you’re a mining engineer with a demolitions specialty, remember?) so you, in response, joined Red Faction out of necessity and the desire to get payback for your dead brother.

The game itself plays a lot like some other titles, especially Saints Row, Grand Theft Auto, Just Cause and Mercenaries, and offers many of the same elements.  You can steal cars, which look a lot more like moon rovers and have apparently enhanced suspension to handle the rocky terrain better.  You’ll roam around a map with multiple zones, blowing things up, knocking things down, and shooting holy hell out of the EDF in an effort to wrest control of Mars away from them and put it back in the hands of the people.

There is a truly incredible variety of things to do in this game, make no mistake about that.  Within my first few minutes I had blown up several abandoned buildings, collected scrap from said buildings to upgrade my weaponry and hardware, and shot about thirty five stormtroopers—err…EDF troops.  I do enjoy a game that’s about more than walk from point A to point B and shoot whatever wanders in front of you.  As a result, this may actually be my favorite Red Faction game just by the sheer fact that it actually includes something different to do.

Granted, it’s not that much different from a first person shooter—its biggest difference may well be just a matter of perspective (no pun intended), but with the addition of driving and setting explosives and collecting items, it does elevate the game slightly above its predecessors.  It’s a good rental, no mistake there, but whether or not it’ll be a good buy depends on just how much you like shooter games with some solid action.

Clive Barker’s Jericho Game Review–The Title Is Warning Enough

I really, REALLY, hate Clive Barker.

It’s bad enough that he unleashes his misery on us in book form and in movie form, but recently, he’s dropped a video game on us too.  Not his first, I know, but it’s no less painful for the fact that it isn’t first.  If anything, it’s actually MORE painful, because he did it to us once already—now he’s come back for seconds.  It’s called Jericho, and it’s out for the Xbox 360, Playstation 3, and PC.

Anyway, this time, Clive Barker’s bringing us the story of the Firstborn, which he claims is part of Apocryphal and Gnostic texts (parts of the Bible in case you don’t follow that sort of thing) as the first thing God ever created.  It’s not male, it’s not female, but it’s both beautiful and horrifying all at once.  God, not surprisingly, turned out not to like the thing he made and thus shut it up in the Abyss.  He then followed up with humanity, which turned out much more to God’s liking than the androgynous singularity he’d made earlier.  And then, just to prove that Clive Barker’s grasp on logic is as tenuous as his grasp of sanity or writing a decent book, it turns out that the Firstborn decided to not be banished any more, and so, he wasn’t.  He made seven attempts to break out of the Abyss, and every time, God sent him back, but not without taking a piece of the planet with him.  The empty chunks of earth became fragments of time and space, and then did bizarre things to the world around them.  The U.S. government, as represented by the Department of Occult Warfare, sends in the Jericho Squad to investigate one such singularity, which one of its former members is using as a gateway to bring the Firstborn back into the world.

See, that’s a real mouthful of a storyline until you consider that Jericho is yet another first person shooter.  This is like trying to put a Ferrari chassis around a moped and expecting people to believe you own a Ferrari.  Seriously, they’ve put everything into this—time travel, various occultic stuff…lesbians…yes, lesbians.  They’re part of the plot, even though they’re really not here for anything more than the inevitable “hey look at this!” effect.

And while the game has spectacularly creepy visuals, the gameplay itself is suffering from some kind of mild brain damage, because your elite team of master soldiers dies a lot more often than master soldiers really should.  That may be the worst part about the whole thing—even I have to admit that this is a really impressive story, even if it requires massive suspension of disbelief.  And what do they DO with this story?  They strap a chain gun barrel to it and say “Here, go shoot something.  A lot.”  Great—why do I find myself utterly unable to care?  Maybe it’s because my character is just a gun barrel people talk to.

While this might have made a pretty good movie (or even series thereof), sadly, it doesn’t make a game worth a hill of beans.  There are much better first person shooters out there, with much more action and adventure and fun than this could ever generate.

Call of Duty: World at War Game Review–Leftovers In Shiny Foil

So by now you may have heard about Call of Duty: World at War, otherwise known as Call of Duty 5 for the PC, DS, Wii, Xbox 360, and Playstations two and three.  It’s a game that manages to fuse together the mundane and the unique.  The down side, of course, is that it mostly fuses the mundane to itself to make some horrible ironmongery of stuff you’ve already seen a couple hundred times before.

But before I get right down to business, it’s time for a plot rundown:  we follow a series of different soldiers in all different parts of the Allied forces as they rampage their way across the Pacific Theatre, up into Russia, BACK to the Pacific, back once again to Russia before taking on Berlin, and accomplishing a series of missions, including calling down rockets on Japanese Ha-Go tank forces, handling a Russian T-34 tank and running the guns on a PBY Catalina flying boat.  You will be effectively a part of the last and loudest hours of World War II.

And, in case you didn’t see this coming by the big number five on the title, yes, this is yet another in a long, long, LONG (and growing…) string of first person shooters.  Sure, they’ve got some additions of new gameplay in here—when’s the last time you got to drive a tank in first person?—but let’s face it; there’s only so much variety you can get out of this particular chopped salad mix.  There’s only so many ways you can make the same old baloney taste new and different.

However—if you’re willing to gut your way through a highly realistic, blood-spattered, downright gritty World War II simulation with more gunfire and explosions than even Saving Private Ryan could muster, presented in a format so eye-wateringly predictable that there’s almost no reason to play, then this time around, you’ll get a special bonus.   It’s called Nazi Zombies mode, and, though they may not specifically be members of the Party, the mode itself comprises a series of maps, some of which are downloadable, in which you and possibly some friends attempt to hold a building against a legion of zombies bound and determined to break in.

The down side of that, of course, is like I said: you have to play your way through the ENTIRE CAMPAIGN to get access.  I’m irritated by this.  I’d personally like to see more first person shooters involving zombies (and ZOMBIES, not second-rate 28 Days Later knockoffs like Left 4 Dead, thank you very much), and the fact that these bastards made me slog through a hell of their own making just to get a crack at some zombie killing fun makes me furious to the point of derangement.

So let’s sum it up:  Call of Duty World at War is not really a BAD game, it’s just more of the same.  They offer some excellent graphics, and some fantastic realism, and even some unique features buried in all the warmed over leftover crap that is their primary campaign mode, but let’s face facts—aside from a pretty new paintjob and some fancy bells and whistles, this really is just more of the same. It’s up to you if you want to take another foray into the same crap you’ve been playing over and over for years, but if you love the first person shooter and just can’t get enough, then this is definitely the game for you.

Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust Game Review–Well, At Least It Tried

It’s strange, when an old series that you’d thought was long dead suddenly decides to crop up again, from literally out of nowhere.  You’d honestly begun to think that you’d never see it again, and in some cases, you might well have forgotten it ever existed at all.  That was the case with the Alone in the Dark series, and now, it’s the case for a whole new generation of PC games suddenly making their revival into the next-gen console market.  This time, we’ve got none other than Leisure Suit Larry back for more raunchy fun in Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust.

And frankly, I’m having a hard time figuring out just what to say about it.

This time around, you’re playing as Larry Lovage, the young horndog nephew to the great scion of the franchise, Larry Laffer, who has recently made good as a cinema magnate.  You’re hired on for a summer job doing grunt work at uncle Larry’s studio, and in the meantime, you’re also out to expose a mole hired by a rival studio to publicly air all of Laffer and  company’s dirty laundry.  In some cases, quite literally.

If you’re familiar with the movie industry at all, it will not surprise you in the least when I tell you this was written by Allen Covert of Happy Madison Productions, convincing me thoroughly that Adam Sandler is out to destroy humanity.  They’ve brought plenty of second-rate B-list star power along to do voiceover work, including Jay Mohr, who’s reprising his seemingly favorite role as a slimeball theatrical agent, not to mention a host of lesser names like Artie Lange, Dave Atell and Carmen Electra.  There are other names in here who probably shouldn’t have been here in the first place, like Patrick Warburton, Jeffrey Tambor and Shannon Elizabeth, but I guess everybody’s got to have a side project.

The gameplay is the most tedious sort of fetch gameplay—go here, get / do that, come back, repeat until you want to throw things, but considering your character is playing the lowest kind of studio grunt (if his title’s not production assistant I’ll be downright amazed), this actually makes sense.  There is a sense of humor here, but it’ll wind up being entirely too devoted to off-color humor of every stripe to be a whole lot of good.  One particularly funny bit occurs in one of the many loading screens, suggesting that your grandmother would LOVE a copy of this game for her birthday.  My grandmother would shatter the disk into bits and force-feed them to me if I ever actually gave her a copy of this.  I just know better.

You may be interested to note that this is the second recent Larry title (the first being Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude), and also the second created with absolutely no input from original Larry designer Al Lowe.  Maybe this has something to do with why they suck so badly.

But I’ll give it this much, it’s nice to NOT play a first person shooter for once, and in this industry, any game that’s not a first person shooter or a sports game has to get extra credit by virtue of SHEER ORIGINALITY.  Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust might be worth a rental just for a little bit of something completely different and a few laughs, but it’s not going to be something you want to bring home to mother.

Or home to grandma, for that matter, despite what the loading screens suggest.

Shellshock 2: Blood Trails Game Review–War Is Hell. So Is This Game

As a wise man once said, folks…war is hell.  And if you ever wanted a down to the minutiae idea of what war was like, go get your hands on a copy of Shellshock 2: Blood Trails.

Bear with me–I’m going to explain that one like no tomorrow and you’re going to be amazed by the time I get done.  But first we’re going to have to tackle the plot, and that’s going to just confuse you blind as to why I call this a really accurate simulation of war.

Shellshock 2: Blood Trails, is a Vietnam-war era first person shooter game revolving around the  Walker brothers, one of which went off into the deepest jungles of Vietnam to recover something called White Knight.  The cargo plane carrying White Knight was shot down by the North Vietnamese in a brief aerial battle.  One month after Caleb Walker went into the jungles in an attempt to fetch White Knight, he emerged from the jungles a gibbering lunatic. Thus, when his brother was drafted and sent to Vietnam, HIS first mission was to try and get something–anything!–out of his now-insane brother.  But brother Caleb wasn’t in the talking mood, and by the time brother Nate showed up, Caleb burst his bonds and rushed out of the facility where he was being held. Now, Nate, along with a few other GIs, are left to hunt down Caleb and solve the mysteries surrounding White Knight…including why the dead in Vietnam seem to be coming back to life.

Yes, that’s right, folks–there’s ZOMBIES afoot.  Now, we’re already a little left of center of reality—not even the Viet Cong thought of harnessing the sheer might of the walking dead.  But there’s realism here in that, much like the actual Vietnam War, when you play it, you very seldom have any idea who’s shooting at you and it’s very clear that those in charge of the game really don’t want you to win.  So you see what I mean—it’s very much like the ACTUAL Vietnam War, just with zombies.

Seriously, I played through this sucker and, even in the very first level, I was getting shot at from a whole lot of different avenues and I could barely even tell where the fire was coming from.  By the time I got to the SECOND level, I couldn’t even see the muzzle flashes anymore.  I was just taking incoming fire, as evidenced by brief flashes of white in my heads-up display, for no clear reason from no clear direction.  I was inside BUILDINGS and still getting hit from all sides.  It was as though the very game around me decided that it wasn’t having me continue to ADVANCE, so it was going to shut me down, one way or another.

So despite the fact that they’ve got zombies going on in here, the really amazing part of the whole mess is is that this is almost EXACTLY like what we hear about the Vietnam War.  The only downside is that this not only makes for a really bad experience for pretty much everybody, it also makes for a really lousy game.  There’s nothing worse than trying to exist in an environment where unseen people shoot at you and you have absolutely no idea how or where to return fire.  Bad enough to get shot at, how much worse to get shot at from random directions?

That sums up my experience with the whole thing nicely—this game is so badly flawed that it’s almost unplayable.  There’s absolutely no reason to play this misbegotten wreck, so don’t even try.

Unreal Tournament 3 Game Review–Fun In First Person

I have to admit that when I played Unreal Tournament 3, I was expecting the worst.  I was expecting yet another half-baked, warmed-over pile of leftover sludge in the form of a first person shooter, which are rapidly glutting the market in job lots.  But actually playing Unreal Tournament 3, now available for the Xbox 360, Playstation 3 and PC, became something interesting–it became FUN.

In Unreal Tournament 3, you play as the Ronin, formerly the defenders of the Twin Souls mining colony until said colony was wiped out by an attack from the Necris.  The Necris, just for background, are a subspecies of humanity that genetically modified themselves thanks to the Phayder Corporation as Black Ops forces par excellence.  Anyway, the Necris launched an attack on Twin Souls for reasons that I’m not a hundred percent sure of, and left the Ronin without a home.  They took up residence with the Izanagi Corporation on their home planet, and became a mercenary unit.  Now, they need to curry favor with Izanagi to get the necessary resources and equipment to go hunt up the Necris and get some terminal payback on the homewreckers.

There are actually several OTHER races in the Unreal Tournament universe that will make an appearance in the multiplayer classifications and as ancillary parts of the story, including the Axon and Malcolm and the Thunder Crash team (or Thunder CASH, as Malcolm likes to call them), so you can’t fault this game for a lack of storyline.  It’s got storyline almost in excess, really.  But the gameplay is the important issue here–and surprisingly, the gameplay is actually pretty entertaining.

You’ll engage in a series of different kinds of fights, including straight battles, a duel system, and even a variant of capture the flag in which FlAG is actually an acronym for FieLd Ambient Generator, if I remember it correctly.  That may be the most innovative use for an old retread that I’ve ever seen.  It’s like someone took apart a water heater and made a woodburner stove out of it–this kind of recycling never fails to impress me, because even though it’s nothing new, it’s a completely new use for something old.

The controls are smooth, the arenas are sufficiently open that even I don’t get motion sickness very often, and with selectable difficulty levels you can customize the gameplay to feel like an invincible genius or like a hard-bitten warrior.  Multiplayer is also well-present, and if you want a good party game, you could do a whole lot worse.  Despite the fact that you’ll be essentially playing the same games over and over again–deathmatch, team deathmatch, VEHICLE deathmatic, capture the flag, et al, it’s still surprisingly fun, and it’s actually worth playing the single player version to get properly accustomed to the various maps for multiplayer fun.

There’s a lot to like about Unreal Tournament 3, and in all honesty, I don’t have this much fun with first person shooters often.  For once, I can actually recommend a first person shooter, and that feels both strange and good at the same time.  Hot action, a dash of adventure, and lots of shooter glee combine to make a title that even I can enjoy.

Quantum of Solace Game Review–A High Caliber First Person Shooter

So when I saw that someone had converted the latest James Bond shooterific epic into a game, Quantum of Solace, now available for Playstations 2 and 3, the Wii, PC, DS and the Xbox 360, I sighed the sigh of a man who’d been here many, MANY times before.  I knew without so much as looking at the back of the box that it was going to be a first person shooter and heavily resemble the movie.  This was the case for virtually every James Bond title since Goldeneye’s incredible success, and since then, everyone’s been pretty much imitating Goldeneye.

This time around, there will be some differentiation as Quantum of Solace incorporates events from TWO different Bond installments–Casino Royale and its namesake Quantum of Solace, with a few events unique to the game–Bond is out to recover Mr. White, and fights his way through a small army.  Getting Mr. White back to Siena, Bond discovers that Quantum, an organization Mr. White is part of, has agents that have managed to infiltrate MI6.  From here, Bond proceeds onward through a whirlwind, worldwide adventure, gaining his vaunted Double O status, and ultimately attempting to take down Quantum.

And indeed, what I believed would be the case before I slapped the game in my system was to be—it was a first person shooter that mirrored the events of the movies fairly closely, albeit with some noticeable differences, and I thought that it was going to be yet another in a long string of games that I had already played before.  The unusual thing about the whole mess was that I actually had some fun with this one.  Maybe it was the smoothness of the controls, or the way I got a variety of weapons right out of the gate.  I don’t know what it was, but I both had fun and did NOT get seasick, relative rarities as far as first person shooters go.

And that’s the problem, isn’t it?  It’s a first person shooter game.  If you’re not a huge James Bond fan or really into first person shooters then there’s only so much fun you can have here.  Indeed, I started getting bored with the whole thing after I shot up Mr. White’s pocket army at his house.

There is some further help on this one—there are several multiplayer modes to help improve playability and long-term replay value.  A first person shooter DOES make a good party game with lots of action, so there’s some value here, unless you’re chronically playing alone.

Let’s be clear—Quantum of Solace may be one of the best first person shooters I’ve ever played, but still, it’s only the best first person shooter I’ve ever played.  It’s like finding that particular brand of rat poison that makes you throw up the least when you mix it in a milkshake.  Or maybe the particular brand of anvil that hurts the least when you drop it on your foot.  I’ve only seen a handful of really entertaining first person shooters in my time, and admittedly, Quantum of Solace is one of them.  It’s a good rental, but sadly, not much else than that.

Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena–A Nice Try But Still Lacking

Once again I applaud the sheer business acumen of Vin Diesel and company Tigon Studios for continuing to release second-rate video games at the rate of as fast as they possibly can to perpetrate as many colossal cash-grabs as possible.  Perhaps their most recent attempt is to cash in on the phenomenal Riddick license with recent title Xbox 360 title Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena, making me wonder how they got it in the first place.  Sublet from Universal?  Or did Vin keep a bit of Riddick as part of his Pitch Black work?  Dunno.

Anyway, like I said, Riddick’s back, and this time he’s taking on a mercenary ship called the Dark Athena (hence the title).  He’ll be taking on legions of mercenaries and armed guards and attack drones and whatnot, and he’ll be spending a lot of time sneaking around in the dark to do his killing, taking full advantage of his illicit optical modifications (a shine job in case you’ve forgotten the original Pitch Black).

While it’s always fun to watch Riddick be a sociopath to children as young as five—seriously, Riddick, it’s not cool to be all snarly and threatening toward small children.  It’s like taking a sand blaster to a soup cracker.  How about just a little variety?  Why don’t you just juggle once?  Hit someone with a pie? Do something ridiculous for no clear reason—and not kill anyone.

Ironically, this tiny rant directed at a fictional character may well be the best explanation of what’s wrong with the whole concept of Riddick video games and Assault on Dark Athena in particular.  There’s no VARIETY.  Riddick sneaks around, goes shiny-eyes, kills people, repeat until everyone bows down and declares Riddick the absolute emperor of cool.  Okay, we GET IT ALREADY.  This whole game smells like dead horse because they WON’T STOP FLOGGING ONE.

I’ll give them credit—they tried.  They added on some first-person shooter sort of stuff, gave Riddick access to assault rifles and shotguns and whatnot.  This is cool, make no mistake, but it’s also the same kind of thing that you’ve played a whole bunch of times.  Yes, it’s cool to sneak around in the dark and jam a hairpin into a guy’s brain stem. That’s innovative, but not a big part of the whole thing.  I liked being able to kill enemies by dropping off high places and using them to break my fall.  Again, innovative, but too small to be of much use.  And I definitely have to give some due props for including a complete port of Escape From Butcher Bay, giving some added value.  But the biggest problem remains—while these small additions are welcome touches of innovation, the rest of the package is so badly lacking that there’s not much sense to playing it.

In that sense, it’s a whole lot like that earlier Vin Diesel game Wheelman, because that too was a big steaming batch of More of the Same.  Get right down to it, I can’t recommend this one unless you’re a rabid Riddick fan or can’t get enough of the first person shooter subgenre, in which case you’re definitely going to be all over this.

Razer and Valve Creating Game, Motion Controller

Gaming peripheral manufacturer Razer and Valve, the development studio who have created not only franchises but an entirely new distribution model are teaming up to bring their considerable talents to bear on a quite ambitious project. The vast majority of Valve’s efforts have been centered around the FPS genre and this new game seeks to break the mold while still being firmly ensconced in everything we love about the genre.

The title is planned as a first entry into a new permutation of the FPS genre as the press release calls HellRazer: Triple Helix the ‘debut title’. It’s a squad-based tactical FPS game, which on the surface doesn’t sound like anything impressive at all. Where the importance of the partnership comes in is the control scheme. Razer is developing a brand new peripheral dedicated specifically to this game and any developed after it. Ironically while many hardcore gamers are calling the Wii a gimmick, Razer’s new peripheral is going to be a motion sensing controller, which is currently under development in their Singapore labs and the company aims to make it the first true 1:1 motion sensing controller.

“Razer is extending its vision by partnering up with Valve on this exciting new collaborative project,” said Razer president Robert “Razerguy” Krakoff. “For the first time, PC gamers will be able to experience a more integrated, immersive gameplay in a first-person shooter game.”

Oh and by the way, April Fools. Check the website for the official press release, which is hilarious. It’s almost tragic that this is a joke, because there are certain features of the game that sound actually enjoyable, like multiplayer modes where certain events can cause players to change to a different team altogether.

Gaming Drives You Crazy

In the majority of research seeking to probe the link between gaming and aggression researchers use combat-oriented games like Call of Duty or Mortal Kombat. A new study coming from Huddersfield University in the UK suggests that shooting games might not be as affecting as previously thought.

One of the biggest problems with previous aggression research is that the actual measurement of aggression varies from study to study and some researchers use questionable definitions of aggression. This study sought to shed light on unquestionable measures of emotion by measuring sheer physical data (EEG, heart rate and breathing) in addition to the usual mental measures.

The participants, aged 18-45 played one of three games on the Xbox 360; either a 3-D table tennis game, an FPS game or Project Gotham Racing (the only game whose title they actually reveal). Interestingly the driving game induced the greatest change in brain activity and heart rate, while the FPS defied expectations by producing less of a change than even the table tennis game.

This certainly explains why my friends who take a sound beating in Halo quite gentlemanly rage and scream whenever we play Mario Kart. Nothing says ‘frustration’ like blue shells.